THOMAS CARLYLE.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3117, 24 June 1881, Page 4

THOMAS CARLYLE.

(From New York Ledger),

Ths time was when I would gladly have walked from New York to Albany to see Thomas Carlyle pass by. I wonld not have stipulated for a word with him. What should I, a green, ignorant youth, presume to say to such a man ? No ;to see him pass, and bow in homage to him, arfd watch him till he had gone out of sight, had been enough for me in those days of the Carlyle enthusiasm ! A peculiar experience had prepared me to understand and to welcome this great poet, now asleep with his kindred in old Scotland. At the age of twenty years, I went to England and spent a year in that country. It was during one of those periods of commercial revulsion, to which profuse and extravagant people like the English, who live up to the income of prosperous years, must be forever liable. Never before had I seen destitution except as resulting from intemperance or sudden calamity, and even that had been speedily relieved so far as my knowledge of it went. But now I saw thousands of virtuous and stalwart labourers standing idle along the roadsides, their families palid from want or living as paupers in huge poorhouses, called Unions. It was particularly in the agricultural countries that the distress was most general and most hopeless. The spectacle was so agonising to one who had passed his youth in a land of abundance, and I was brought so near to it by living for several weeks at a farm home in one of the most fertile counties of England, that I was often quite overwhelmed and almost driven mad by it. What made the spectacle more heartrending was the excellent character of the sufferers—kind, good people —dignified and patient; Bprung from virtuous ancestors ; abundantly capable of enjoying and making the most of a lowly lot, provided ifc had furnished them with the means of subsistence.

I asked every one, what is the matter ? What is this? The farmers said : "The price of our produce is so low that wo cannot afford to employ labor as usual." The squire of the parish had abated a part of the' rents, and had caused twelve hundred days' work lv be done in his park that winter, merely that he might give away twelve hundred shillings under the guise of wages. There was no lack of charity, and all agreed that the land would abundantly support the whole population if the people and tho land could only be rightly related. There was the land, needing the labor : there were the laborers needing the land, and most willing to work upon it. And yet, upon both a kind of enchantment seemed to rest; the fields were undrained and unplougbed ; the laborer stood in the highway, gaunt, hungry and hopeless, Her 1 c Was a> problem indeed for a raw lad just' out of school, and as ignorant of the world" tfs a baby. I have never been in my life so distressed' and' so puzzled as I was then. Being in London Borne weeks after, I saw an advertisement in the Times under the head of new publications, te this effect: ( This day. Past and Present. By Thomas Carlyle. 1 vol. Svo. Price 10s 6d. Chapman wid Hall, Stroud.' I had casually heard of this Thomas Cot» lyle as of a wise and unknown man, and, ia consequence of this vague impression, I made my way in the course of the morning to the small and dingy bookstore of Chapman and Hall, paid my ten and sixpence, and brought avray the book. Sympathetic readers can imagine my feelings when I read that evening the opening page of this unique production :.

" The condition of England is justly regarded as one of the strangest ever seen in this world. England is full of wealth, of multifarious produce, supply for human ■want in every kind ; yet England is dying of inanition. With, unabated bounty the land of England blooms and grows; waving with yellow harvests ! thick-studded with workshops, industrial implements, with millions of workers, understood to be the strongest, the cnnningest, and the willingest our earth ever had ; these 1 men are here ; the work they have done', tire fruit they have realized is here, abundant, exuberant on every hand of us : and, behold', some baleful fiat as of enchantment has gone forth, saying : ' Touch it nob, ye workers, ye master-workers, ye master-idlers ; none of you can touch it, no man of you shall be the better for it; this is enchanted fruit.'" These words riveted my attention, for they gave expression to what I had been brooding over for months. Tho whole book was but an expansion of this first page. It was a cry of horror, wrung from the author bj the sight of bo much misery in the the midst of abundance. No country had ever been so rich as England was then, and no country perhaps in time of peace had ever contained suoh an amount of woe and despair. It was objected that Carlyle suggested no remedies. This was not true ; but if it had been true, such a heart-rending shriek, calling the attention of every thoughtful person to the state of things, was itself the beginning of remedy; as a woman, coming upon the dock of a ship at midnight, finding the watoh asleep, and the vessel running among the breakers, utters one cry of alarm, which wakes the crew and saves the vessel. From that time to this, the educated class of Englishman have never been quite so insenlible to the anguish of the poor, never quite so disposed to venerate mere material success, as they were before.

Much that Carlyle afterward wrote was little in harmony with the humane and libaral spirit of this work. I think he gradually lost his humility, lost faith in man, lost hope and cheerfulness, lost even a portion of his sincerity. He secluded himself too much from human society. He undertook long, painful and unsuitable tasks. He wore himself out in giving a careful distillation of tho court gossip of Prussia, and displayed ioal genius ia delineating some portions of the life of Frederick the Great. Nevertheless, all deductions made, thero is a fund of worth and truth in the writings of this man which will make them of value, perhaps, to unborn generations. We give a few samples of his epigramattic wisdom : ' The latest gospel in this world is, Know thy work and do it.' ' Blessed i 3 he who has found his work ; let him ask no other blessedness.'

' The faithfulest of us are unprofitable servants ; the faithfulosfc of us know that best.'

' Wheresoever thou findeßt Disorder, there is thy eternal enemy; attack him swiftly, subdue him ; make Order of him, the subjoot not of chaos, but of intelligence, divinity and thee.'

' Tho thistle that grows in thy path, dig it out, that a blade of useful grass, a drop of nourishing milk, may grow there instead.'

A hundred sentences like theso could be selected from tho works of this modern Jeremiah. Even when he seems perverse and prujudiced, if we closely examine the passage, we shall often find that there is a certain degree of truth in it after all. He speaks for example, with unmeasured contompt of the institutions of the United States. Believing that nearly all men are fools. It was quifco natural for him to suppose that government founded upon the rule of the majority, or the consent of the governed, must be a very bad government. He compares government to a ship trying to get round Cape Horn in a Btormy time, and he says very truly that it would he impossible to navigate the ship successfully, if the captain were obliged, every timo he wished to tack, to call a town-meeting of the crew and take a vote whether to tack or not.

The illustration is irrelevant and absurd. It was never proposed, since the world stood, to navigate a ship, or conduct a newspaper, or direct an administration, on the principle of taking a vote upon every detail. Nevertheless, tho numerous passages in Carlyle'B works of this nature are not altogether destitute of sense. His name for a dull rich man iB Bobus, and he asks, what kind of man Bobus is likely to rote for, if pot §Qme Sohissimus, or some man who is

more of a Bobus than Bolus himself. This ia only a Carlylean way of saying, that a people foolish and corrupt will be likely to elect fooiish and eominfc rulers.

In conversation with Americans, ho delighted to make boisterous fun of our way of electing presidents by universal suffrage. He bore down all opposition, with his strong Scottsih voice, and gave no heed to anything said in opposition to him. Incontrovertible facts refute him. We have elected twenty presidents, nearly all of whom were worthy and capable gentlemen, and some of them were of distinguished ability and merit. Take the whole twenty, with all their limits and shortcomings, we can claim that they are superior to any line or dynasty of kings of which history makes mention, whether ifc be called Tudor, Planfcagenefc, Stuart, Guelph, Bourbon, Valois, or Hohenzollern.

Compare our twenty presidents with any twenty successive kings!